High school students in Roxborough, Philadelphia, are taking a hands-on approach to farm-to-table dining, thanks to a new dairy farm at Walter B. Saul High School.
Students are responsible for everything from bringing the cows into the barn and processing the milk, so it’s ready to be turned into cheese at the dairy barn.
“I kind of feel accomplished in some sort of way because it’s like, when you’re shopping, you don’t really think you have any part of the whole process,” Iman-Renee McCall, an 11th-grade farmer, told NBC News.
The school is named after Walter Biddle Saul, a prominent attorney in the city of Philadelphia and former President of the Philadelphia Board of Education. The school was founded in 1943 as Wissahickon Farm School. Saul threw his influence behind the school’s agricultural programs.
The school remains the largest agricultural farm school in the U.S. While the farm and dairy science program has been around for decades, it has the pandemic to thank for its new cheesemaking business.
“One of the truckers retired and nobody picked up his route and so we were scrambling to find an outlet for our milk,” farm manager Jane Arbasak said.
They had to think of a way to use the milk being produced by the farm’s lactating cows.
“The last thing we wanted to do was to dump milk,” Arbasak said.
Students learn how to take care of the cows and get a deep insight into the business side of the farming industry.
According to the U.S. National Farm to School Network, increased knowledge and awareness about gardening, agriculture, healthy eating, local foods and seasonality enhanced overall academic achievement, as did greater fruit and vegetable consumption both at school and at home.
“You’re coming in here, you make sure that it’s healthy because that’s your cow, that’s your responsibility,” said Justin Perry, an 11th grader. “You want to treat it like it’s your family.”
